Society for Classical Learning

1 day ago

www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/measure-of-homer-review/?prufrocknews.com

" Which poem is better, the Iliad or the Odyssey? I don’t have hard numbers to back this up, but today it seems pretty clear that the Odyssey wins hands down in the mass popularity stakes. Recent translations, adaptations and rewritings of the Odyssey (many of them excellent – Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott, Simon Armitage) vastly outnumber modern reworkings of the Iliad. The ancients would have found this preference deeply weird. It was the Iliad that showed Homer “at the height of his spirit”, as the critic Longinus put it. The Odyssey was self-evidently the work of an elderly poet whose powers were fading: it was digressive and rambling, padded out with leftovers from the Iliad. As Hunter shows, this assessment was absolutely universal: it is hard to find a single ancient Greek who preferred the Odyssey to the Iliad." ... See MoreSee Less

Afternoon sex and the pursuit of poetry

the-tls.co.uk

There is a village in central Turkey, not far from Konya, called Çeşmelisebil. Apologies to anyone from Çeşmelisebil who is reading this, but it really is an absolute dump. Picture a low jumble of...